The Stars My Destination

There's got to be more to life than just living.

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Rating: 3/5 – Pretty decent

There’s some great stories in here somewhere, floundering and half-formed. You can catch flashes of them hidden in the examination of a teleporting society, or in the character of the relentless Gully Foyle. But they’re only glimpses, not fully realized.

Still, those teases of a better book do add up to an overall compelling story. This was likely a better book when it was written, as a lot of the power behind its ideas has been lost in the geopolitical and sociological shifts since The Stars My Destination was published.

There is often something dissonant about older science fiction. None of the old authors were able to properly forecast the dominance of computers in everyday life and that miss feels more egregious the older I get. But more than that I think it’s the wishful thinking they projected on their vision of society. So many of the texts harbor a gleeful fantasy about the death or criminalization of organized religion in the glorious future. It’s one of the many ways they seek to simplify the world, instead of expanding on it’s marvelous complexity.

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